Mark

My entire journalistic career, editors & owners & bosses told me again & again that my stuff was too long, too in-depth, too wonky, no one would read it.

Again & again, readers flocked to the longer, wonkier pieces, passed them around, wrote me to thank me for them, cited them years later.

Not acknowledging any of this or caring about presentation means you’re just rattling the bars of the cage.

You could care about graphic design and if you are not able to influence and shape your messages to that extent, or work with supportive art direction, go independent and do things properly that give your work the support structures, expressive delivery and cognitive amplification it deserves.

Do the right thing for your message. You could break it up into multiple short pieces. You could make a micro site or interactive animation to showcase complex data. You could measure success of longer works by aggregate citations, longevity and relevance over time, influence on your peers.

There are many different reasons to write a long, densely connected paragraph-centric essay or article that doesn’t need to be bounded by word count, headline clicks, read completion or time-bound freshness.

There are many different ways to handle deep detailed investigative work that doesn’t succumb to the pit trap of longform content box. That’s why journalists working on these stories need to collaborate with designers, artists and engineers on equal footing as with editors. Combine your powers.

This is not arguing for “visual medium” vs reading. We know the web is a text medium. We’re currently going through a societal process of forgetting everything we knew about visual language because of large language model prompts. What I am saying is to make decisions that prioritise the message.

When you see “longform” as just more words in a container that can’t change, you’re risking losing the audience before even starting to put a piece together.

If you have no way of influencing editorial design or adapting presentation to fit message and structure, you’re pushing a boulder uphill.

All this is foreclosed by the functional fixed mindset of typing, words going into “article” box in CMS, presentation being incidental to structure and content, rather than developed in unison.

We’ve been laying words out on print pages for hundreds of years. Pushed the limits of the medium and expressive possibilities for the past century. We have at least three decades of experience translating written and graphic design conventions to interactive media.

Not much that will address the problems with attention tied to scrolling and light emitted from screens that are articulated in the piece.

“Structure is important” might feel obvious but is an important point.

But what is possible with structure when you strip back all the possibilities of the digital medium to bare constraints of pasting paragraphs and sentences and occasional pull quotes into a box in a CMS?

This is clickbait but worth responding to because it’s getting a huge reaction from people and because of how directly it reveals a huge gap in the mental model of so many journalists and writers who have to interact with the mediocrity of so many news editors and online publications.

It’s not everything that’s happening, but it’s definitely a significant part of it. Talented people good at their jobs get punished, while mediocrats lord over workplace bullying and set themselves up in the asset class.

Having functioning health, education and other public services or businesses that deliver value should never be allowed to get in the way of neoliberal boomers, gen Xers and old millennials achieving Bach-Boat-BMW lifestyle via managerial promotions in financial services and corporate consulting.

You can actually see the dark stripe of ultramafic mantle rocks. One of the world’s most fascinating geological features: a full top to bottom section of oceanic plate that went over rather than under at an ancient continental margin. Sad that it’s getting attention in the worst possible way.

If claims start getting paid out, you're looking at a transfer of wealth with US taxpayer money going to private companies. There's also the possibility that you create an incentive for companies, particularly with older tankers, to feed ships and crews to the woodchipper. It's win-win for them.

/6

The spectre of $5 a litre for your ancient carbon fossil blood.

Good luck perpetuating car culture into a forever future of infinite growth. Good luck preventing the now even more inevitable renewable energy transition.

Good luck staying in power.

There’s something to this. People not only moving for purely ‘economic reasons’ but for the personal and career impact of working under the types of managers promoted by those ‘economic reasons’. Business aesthetics and balance sheet purity culture over actually having working systems.

Fooling people into thinking things prefaced with "BREAKING" are news feels like the equivalent of chatbots fooling people into thinking they're sentient just by using the pronoun "I".

*taps the sign*

Sign reads: "Unfettered capitalism leads to human flesh in the marketplace"

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Had a great playthrough with colleagues recently who co-created a narrative twist where the grandson of a cult leader suddenly took an opportunity to transform the city and seize power after the cult was thought to be long gone. We ran out of time, but was even some talk of turning it into a zine.

Could it be the latitude and temperature moreso than anything else?

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Browsers might actually be acceptable without the WWW and internet connection. Load up a file as an interactive document. Only link stuff from inside the same folder. No data centers needed. No brainwormed psyop information flows going in or out.

🫡 child of the 1980s in NZ here

🎓We are advertising three 2-year research+teaching positions in applied maths or stats.

These have a reduced teaching load (50 lectures a yr) compared to a standard academic position so applicants can gain teaching experience while having time for research

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Genuinely one of the nastiest people in Sydney and that is not for want of competition.

It’s not terrible for a lot of normal use cases. There are certain… interesting… cultural influences at play.